The players: Riya alpha and Flickr
We start the journey at Will Riya Be the End of Flickr? (Publish.com article by Sean Carton).
In a nutshell, Riya’s a system that’s smart enough to recognize stuff in pictures after being trained—faces, text, objects—and then auto-tag all the photos in a folder containing all that stuff. Automatically. Just upload your pictures, set your privacy settings (how and if you want photos to be shared), “teach” Riya by clicking on thumbnails of the faces it finds in your photos, and sit back as it “looks” at each photo and tags the faces it finds.
But it doesn’t have to be faces. If you select a recognizable object in a photo—say a picture of Big Ben in London—it’ll find all the occurrences of that object in your other photos and tag them accordingly. A search function will allow you to do compound searches, theoretically permitting you to search for “Mom” and “Boat” and finding all the pictures that you took of your Mom on her boat (or whatever recreational conveyance your Mom cruises around on).
Then we proceed to Munjal Shah at the official Riya Blog:
Clarification: Riya does not do object recognition – some limited object similairty – but very limited. Our services does do face and text recognition.
Comment: I don’t think Riya will be the end of Flickr. The power of Flickr is the community building infrastructure it provides. The ability to relate with others and communicate with photos as only a proxy for doing that. Many of the tags on Flickr are more emotive or editorial in nature and a computer is never going to be able to replace that.
End journey. See, people? You can’t escape sensationalist and spastic media even in the trenches of the IT world. Even Wired News has a heavily colored write-up without pointing out directly that this is for FACIAL recognition only and there are a bazillion jillion images without faces in them.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s neat and I am sure people will find it useful. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the end of hand-attributing photos, so settle the hell down.
